What Is an Entity Home?

An entity home is the one page on your own website that you treat as the official source of facts about your practice, and that your other profiles and listings point back to. For a health practice, it is usually the home page or a single About page that states your name, location, providers and specialty in plain words. The idea is to give search engines and AI tools one clear place to confirm who you are, instead of leaving them to piece it together from scattered mentions.

How an entity home works

Think of your practice as an entity, a specific thing that systems try to recognize. Facts about that entity are scattered across your website, your Google listing, social profiles, state board pages and directories. Those facts rarely match perfectly. The entity home is the tiebreaker. It is the page you control, so it holds the version you want believed.

Google's own documentation points the same direction. Its organization markup guide recommends placing the information on your home page, or on a single page that describes your organization, and says you do not need it on every page. Two fields do the identifying. The url field is the address of your website and, in Google's words, helps it uniquely identify the organization. The sameAs field lists pages on other websites with more information about you, and you can list several.

A working entity home has five parts.

• Plain-text facts. Practice name, full address, phone, hours and a one-sentence description of what you treat, written as readable text and not hidden in an image.
• Provider information. Names, credentials and specialties, with links to each provider's own page.
• Markup. Organization or clinic markup that repeats the same facts in code. See schema markup.
• Outbound links. Links to your official profiles, which the sameAs field also lists.
• Inbound links. Your Google listing, social profiles and directories point to this exact page.

The inbound links matter as much as the page itself. When your Google Business Profile, Facebook page, LinkedIn page and directory listings all link to the same address, they agree about where the official version lives. A mismatch, such as one profile linking to a booking page and another to an old domain, tells a system there may be two practices.

The page also has to be readable by crawlers. OpenAI documents separate bots with separate jobs. OAI-SearchBot is used to surface sites in ChatGPT search, GPTBot is used for model training, and ChatGPT-User visits a page when a person asks about it. Those settings are independent, so a robots.txt file can allow one and block another. Cloudflare announced in July 2025 that it was changing its default to block AI crawlers, so if your site runs behind a security service, check whether it is turning bots away without anyone deciding to.

Google also states that a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to appear in its AI features, and that no special markup or text file is required for that.

The wording of the factual block matters. Open with a short, checkable sentence in this shape: the practice name, what kind of practice it is, what it does, the city and the year it was founded or opened. Use the practice name in that sentence and in the key facts below it, not "we" or "our clinic", because a sentence lifted out of the page has to make sense alone. If you want, add a small "by the numbers" block, but only with real figures you can keep current, such as years in practice or the number of providers. List former names and common misspellings once, plainly, so a system can connect them to you. Linking out to your Google listing and your state license lookup shows readers where the facts can be confirmed.

For a fuller version, a simple fact table works well. Give each row a claim, the value, who or what it applies to, where it can be verified and the date you last checked it. A row such as "Accepts HSA payment | yes | all locations | billing page | checked this month" makes stale facts easy to spot.

Example: an entity home at a health practice

This example is illustrative, not a transcript. A med spa with one location has facts in six places. The website says one name. The Instagram bio says a shorter name. A directory lists a suite number from before a remodel. The lead injector's credentials live on a booking page that changes whenever the menu changes. The Google listing links to a landing page built for a promotion that ended last spring.

A patient asks an AI tool which med spa nearby has a nurse practitioner who does injectables. The tool finds conflicting pages and has no single source to trust. The practice is the harder one to name, even though its work is good.

The fix is small. The med spa picks its home page as the entity home. It adds a plain block near the top with its name, address, phone, hours, the injector's name and credentials, and a sentence on the services offered. It adds clinic markup repeating those facts, with sameAs links to its official profiles. Then it changes the Google listing, Instagram bio and directories to link to that one address.

Real data shows why the page you control matters. MGMA analyzed 33,340 ChatGPT citation events across 200 practices, 20 metros and 10 specialties in May 2026. Practice-owned websites accounted for about 23% of citations, behind hospital staff rosters at 27.5% and ahead of national medical directories at 8.3%. The same article reports that Google Business Profile received zero direct citations, which the author attributes to Google not exposing reviews as crawlable pages. The author founded a commercial service, and the study is correlational and covers one platform, so read the numbers as direction and not as a forecast.

One more point from Google's help pages. Knowledge panels are generated automatically from many web sources, and an official representative can claim a panel to suggest changes. An entity home gives those sources a clean version to agree with.

How to check yours in 60 seconds

1. Open your website's home page on your phone.
2. Without scrolling past the first two screens or clicking anything, look for your exact practice name, full address, phone number, provider names and what you treat.
3. Open your Google listing, then your Facebook page. Tap the website link on each and see whether it lands on that same page.
4. Add /robots.txt to the end of your web address and scan for lines that block bots by name.

Any missing item, or links that land on different pages, means you do not have a working entity home yet.

What to do about it

1. Choose the page. For most practices it is the home page. Multi-location practices can use the home page for the brand and one page per location.
2. Write a short factual block near the top with name, address, phone, hours, providers and specialties, in plain text.
3. Add organization or clinic markup that repeats those same facts, with url and sameAs links to your official profiles. The steps are in medical schema.
4. Point your Google Business Profile, social profiles and directory listings to that exact address, with the same spelling and the same trailing slash.
5. Check robots.txt and any security service for rules that block AI crawlers, and decide on purpose which ones you allow.
6. Give each provider a stable bio page and link it from the entity home.
7. Review the page whenever a provider, phone number, address or hours change, and at least once a year even if nothing seems different. Keep a dated note of what changed.
8. Once a year, list former names, old suite numbers and common misspellings in one place, and check that each outside profile that still shows them has been corrected.